After several years of severe drought conditions, New Mexico has been deluged with rainstorm after rainstorm this summer. (I must have brought the rains with me, after my trip to PA, which also had continuous rains and severe flooding).

Everything is so green and damp, it must resemble the area Jenise lives in. I even have mushrooms coming up in my front and back yard. A local chef also told me how I can prepare the local and plentiful snails for eating. (My turtle had a snail riding on him. I swear I could hear the snail saying, "Wheee!")

Albuquerque has had quite a bit of flooding. So far, two people have been swept away (at 30 mph, but rescued) by water running in arroyos. Nearby Rio Rancho has had some suburbs really get hit hard. Those areas that didn't have paved roads yet were completely cut off when those roads were completely washed away by the rains, exposing water and sewer lines.

Now for the bad news: NM has a bumper crop of chile this year (a friend has already put up seven sacks of chile in his chile-only freezer), but Hatch--which grows some of the best--is completely under water and the area's crop may be lost.

Good news. The Hatch chile crop, unlike the village itself, is not flooded. There's about another 6 weeks of harvest left, so if there's not too much more rain to ruin the crop, everything should be okay. So far, the market price is staying steady.

We're situated in a part of Albuquerque that should never get flooded. The worst that's happened to us so far from all the rain is my piano has really gotten out of tune and our swamp cooler doesn't work too well with all this humidity.